The rise of the modern House speaker began 40 years ago as party caucuses became more unified and members demanded stronger central leadership — often at the expense of committee chairmen.

The late Tip O’Neill, the first of the modern speakers, approached this task with caution. Newt Gingrich went a huge step further, even channeling Oliver Cromwell. Nancy Pelosi created her own global warming panel. And upon becoming speaker in 2011, John Boehner wasted no time before kicking the House Appropriations Committee out of its Capitol offices.

But this concentration of power in the speakership comes at a price. It diminishes not just the chairmen but the speaker’s identity as a constitutional officer for the whole House. It tilts the scales more in favor of party interests and away from the institution.

Instead of presiding over legislation, speakers take ownership. More and more, measures are rewritten on the second floor of the Capitol, not committee offices. The Medicare prescription drug bill was introduced as H.R. 1 in June 2003 by then-Speaker Dennis Hastert. Five months later, the Illinois Republican famously kept a House roll call open for hours as he switched the last votes needed for passage.

All this history comes to bear, looking back at the bedlam of the past few weeks. And what Washington saw was the concentrated power of the modern speakership turned onto itself — reduced to dysfunction by deep divisions inside the GOP.

Boehner behaved less as a constitutional officer than a party leader, repeatedly denying the House a chance to vote on the Senate bill to reopen the government. Indeed, the rule written to keep the Democrats in check would have been more correct if it had assigned that sign-off power to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) — not Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the speaker’s deputy.

Adding to this collapse inside the leadership was the very personal nature of the debate itself — a landmark set of health care reforms, which Republicans have renamed for the president himself: Obamacare.

No one familiar with American history can be entirely surprised.

The Affordable Care Act didn’t just build more community health centers. It was a major bit of social engineering championed by the nation’s first black president. It reached into private lives with new mandates and arrived amid major economic stress in the country after the financial collapse in 2008. This helped to spur a largely white, populist anti-government movement inside the GOP, ground down by years of war and economic stress and vulnerable to a grass-roots takeover often aided by wealthy interests with their own anti-regulatory agenda.

Boehner rode this tiger back to power in the House in the 2010 elections and its flashes of idealism genuinely appealed to him from his own Gang of Seven days as a younger House member. But in this shutdown and debt crisis, it also pushed him to advance its utopian vision with radical means at odds with his constitutional role.

The normal checks and balances of government are designed to deal with the personal emotions of just such a situation. But they were sorely missing here.

The speakership, the vessel in which so much power has been invested, became a symbol of weakness. The shared vision that gave rise to the modern speaker was gone, and Boehner was reduced to placating different factions in his party while the House was frozen in place.

What if the sign-off approved by his own House Rules Committee had actually allowed the Appropriations chairman to make that decision on calling up the Senate bill? Would that have taken some of the heat off Boehner alone and allowed a more democratic process?

No one will know, but going forward, one critical question is how much House chairmen will begin to step into the power vacuum and begin to lead themselves.

The Senate compromise which ended the ordeal was adopted with much hoopla Wednesday night. But it reads like something written by Gen. Custer and the Sioux Nation. There is no end to the fights ahead. Treaty deadlines run out in a matter of months with the risk of another shutdown in January.

But the promise of a long-delayed House-Senate budget conference is pivotal and gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) an opportunity to re-establish himself as a legislator and help his fellow chairmen as well.

As a rule, Republican committee chairmen are not a bold lot. They are kept on a short leash with six-year term limits. And over time, House GOP chairmen have shown less and less of a shared purpose in moving legislation — as seen in the number who deserted House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) during June’s farm bill debate.

But unlike Boehner, committee chairs need only a majority in their caucus to survive and are better able to reach out to Democrats in their own bailiwick. And four — Ryan, Lucas, Hal Rogers (Appropriations) and Dave Camp (Ways and Means) — have a chance to make a difference in the months ahead.

Lucas is one step ahead in that he is already in conference with the Senate on a five-year farm bill. He has a willing partner in Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) who has been there before as the committee chairman during the 2008 farm bill debate. And in Mississippi, Sen. Thad Cochran, the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, he has a fellow Southerner with shared interests in the commodity title.

Peterson worries that the whole situation could implode if the GOP right — frustrated by its losses in the shutdown fight — demands a “pound of flesh” from the farm bill. But after a year of delay, Boehner himself would like to put the issue behind him. And if Lucas and Peterson can come back with a package showing $35 billion in 10-year savings, the speaker would be hard-pressed to keep it off the floor.

For Rogers at Appropriations, the most important goal is to get some agreement on how Congress will deal with the second round of sequestration cuts threatened in January under the Budget Control Act. This creates such a volatile situation that the whole appropriations process has ground to a halt, and both Rogers and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) have spent most of this year in parallel universes.

The Kentucky Republican will not be part of the budget conference now but is hugely helped by the fact that Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of Appropriations, will be at Ryan’s side pressing for some answers.

Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash), who met with Ryan Thursday, is herself on the Senate Appropriations Committee. And apart from Cole, Reps. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) are among the House budget conferees and also have ties to Appropriations.

If a target is reached by Dec. 13 — as the Senate compromise envisions — Rogers and Mikulski can move quickly to write real bills before the government is faced with another shutdown Jan. 15. It will mean no Christmas holiday but the biggest present Appropriations wants: being relevant again.

Camp’s opportunities rest very much on Ryan’s success as well. But the Ways and Means chairman already has devoted considerable energy to a corporate tax reform initiative that could be the basis of an agreement with the White House.

Republicans, including Boehner, would prefer to go much further and address individual income taxes as well. But since no one any longer is talking of a “grand bargain” with Obama, moving ahead on the corporate side as a first step could be a reasonable goal and one that could aid the economic recovery.

As part of any deal, the administration would like some of the revenue spun off by the reforms to fund new investments in infrastructure. Both Camp and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) are looking at transition rules where there would be a charge — perhaps 5.25 percent — on earnings held offshore by multinationals — regardless of whether they are repatriated.

This could generate an estimated $200 billion over the next decade, according to tax estimates, and much of this would be in the early years. Republicans are dead set against giving up any such revenue — even if it is a one-time windfall. And Camp wants credit for these dollars as he tries to bring rates down and still fit into a revenue neutral window.

Then again, Obama could potentially help here by allowing tax writers to take credit for future savings from mandatory programs — many of which go through the same Ways and Means Committee. And if Obama got some early money for infrastructure investment, it could also make it easier to reach a bargain in sequestration for Appropriations.

Add in $35 billion from a farm bill, and there are some options. Just think what chairmen might do if they talked to one another.